After a couple months of program tweaking (ticket costs, ticket limits, etc), we were able to finally come up with a program that worked for our community and we wanted to share it with you all. We're doing this because we wanted to know if there are other guilds out there with this kind of program routine.

We have a weekly lottery. 50% of each ticket purchase goes toward the pot while the other 50% goes toward the guild to maintain the PvP server, go toward contest prizes, convert to influence, whatever. So if someone puts in 5 gold, 2.5 gold goes to the pot, 2.5 gold goes to the guild bank. Each ticket is worth 1 gold.

We've given out precursors before as a reward for stuff, but we found it takes quite a bit of gold to turn around and actually post a legendary or a precursor on the trading post. And then you run into the problem of undercutting, which may mean you need to pull it off after a week and attempt re-selling again. Some of the players in our guild are very poor, and this method makes it very difficult for them, especially if it's a precursor they don't want (i.e., Leaf of Kudzu).

So we prefer instead to just do a direct gold payout, and if someone wants to use that amount of gold to buy a precursor or a Mystic Forge Conduit, all the more power to them. We also make a point to include second and third place prizes, as that heightens a player's chances of winning. So that sometimes results in first place not being so large , but more guildies walk away happy (50%/30%/20% split).